74 South Bay Accent
COURTESY OF SOPHIA VELASTEGUI
no idea what I was talking about. ‘But I saw it on Star Trek!’ I’d
tell them. ‘I have to know what it means!’ ”
It was that curiosity and drive that earned Velastegui a full
scholarship to the Georgia Institute of Technology. She had
also been accepted at MIT and other top-tier schools, but chose
Georgia Tech because they would pay for her full education,
an important factor when you’ve grown up in a family of seven
living in a one-bedroom apartment. That’s one reason she has a
special place in her heart for the school. The other: She met her
husband there. Today, she sits on boards there for the College of
Engineering and the school’s Create X Incubator, which offers
seed funding, legal assistance and intensive coaching to students
wanting to be entrepreneurs.
“I like to give time and knowledge and effort to causes I feel
are very important. Education and diversity are the two big ones,
because my husband is Hispanic,” she explains. “I’m Asian and
female. If those opportunities weren’t presented to us, we would
never have met. I’m very thankful for that.”
In the years after earning a bachelor’s degree in mechanical
engineering at Georgia Tech, Velastegui went on to earn a master’s
at UC Berkeley and to complete the board governance and
finance programs at Stanford Law School and Harvard Business
School, respectively.
Velastegui went on to teach herself how to become adept at
both networking and public speaking, which ultimately rocketed
her career in Silicon Valley. Among other roles, she served as chief
product officer at Doppler Labs, where she led product development
for Bluetooth wireless headphones, using machine learning
to create a better audio experience. At Apple, she worked on a
variety of projects, including the Apple Watch, and researched hydrophobic
technology, a precursor to waterproofing devices such
as the iPhone. She also led teams at Nest, a smart home company
later acquired by Google, where she was in charge of the strategic
roadmap for the company’s smart home products.
Last year was a particularly good one. Velastegui was named to
Business Insider’s list of the Most Powerful Female Engineers of
2017. She was also hired by Microsoft as the general manager of
its artificial intelligence (AI) division.
Velastegui’s superstar career trajectory has not been without
obstacles, such as sexist views of female engineers.
“It was extremely helpful that I had mentors and advocates who
had seen these situations and helped me talk it through to see how
to react to it. I was always a tomboy, and I interacted with a lot of
guys in general. It did train me to understand how to address the
situations, and how to get out of them.”
Velastegui was at Google when engineer James Damore wrote
a 10-page letter criticizing the company’s efforts to diversify its
workforce, charging that women were biologically unsuited for
technical fields.
“Yes; I was upset,” she recalls, “but it’s important that the conversation
is stated so the other parties can see and be enlightened
as well. If you don’t talk about it at all, that doesn’t help resolve
the situation. And we also need to hold companies accountable
on the metrics by the numbers.”
Velastegui also notes that many times in her career people,
would assume someone else in the room was in charge, such as a
tall man rather than a smaller Asian woman.
“There was this one team I had in Google. I don’t know why,
but everybody was over 6 feet 2 inches, and I’m 5 feet 4 inches,”
she explains. “People would just assume one of these giants was
the manager, when I was the manager.”
Velastegui has devoted a big part of her life to trying to change
these assumptions, and to mentoring young women and others
in their careers. When she encounters young people who seem to
be interested in technology, she makes a point of reaching out to
them, talking about their interests and handing them her card in
case they want to meet with her for coffee.
And as for what she tells young women in particular who are
interested in technical careers:
“Try it. Go for it,” she says. “With my background, I’ve been
able to pivot to totally different industries, totally different careers,
because engineering is problem solving. That’s the core of
what it is. That’s a skillset that is so valuable.”
Another piece of advice: network, network, network.
“It’s so important,” she says. “Networking helps you understand
the world beyond the groups of friends and others you
interact with on a daily basis. I interact with people in all kinds of
fields, from legal to finance to marketing to medicine. After meeting
with them, I’ll say, ‘Wow; I learned something new today.’
Then later, I’ll find that there’s some aspect of what I learned that
I can use to solve this AI problem at Microsoft.” n
Velastegui went on to teach
herself how to become adept
at both networking and public
speaking, which ultimately
rocketed her career in
Silicon Valley.
Sophia
Velastegui
at Nest